Kiln People by David Brin

(discussed March 27, 2003)

On a ten-point scale (1=bad, 10=good), the people who
read the book gave the following ratings: 5 (Ignacio), 7 (Julie), 7 (Raja), 8 (Abe), 8 (Lisa), 9 (Simms), 9 (TC)Average: 7.6

As often happens, some people really liked the book, and some really
disliked it. (And two of the people who really disliked it did not
vote, for what that's worth.)

On the dislike side, one common complaint was that it was hard to
maintain suspension of disbelief. Nobody seemed to be able to believe
in the golems, the central feature of the book. (John
Gallman said he didn't believe anything in the book,
but Raja felt that the background society's science
and technology were plausible, and an interesting fictional treatment
of ideas from David Brin's nonfiction book, The Transparent
Society.) Ignacio made the interesting comment
that he would have been able to suspend disbelief more easily if this
had been a short story; at 460 pages, there was too much time for him
to be bothered by the golems.

Another cause of complaint was the large number of puns, both
embedded in the story (e.g., G.L.A.Z.I.E.R.) and presented in
the chapter headings. Some people felt that these puns knocked them
straight out of the story (Gregory, in particular,
seemed to give up when he reached G.L.A.Z.I.E.R.) while others (such
as Abe) found them amusing, and a sign that the
author wasn't taking things too seriously.

The third thing that seemed to bother people (even people who
really enjoyed the book) was the ending, with its somewhat
out-of-nowhere metaphysics and "souls".

On the plus side, many people found the idea of making multiple
short-lived copies of yourself to complete several tasks in parallel
to be intriguing--though Gregory didn't think any copy of
himself would be willing to clean toilets ;-). Someone pointed out
that the main character was rich and used greens for menial tasks that
were usually carried out by less-intelligent copies. Along these
lines, several people enjoyed the middle section of the book, where
four versions of the main character did first-person narration, and
these four versions started out very similar, but ended up diverging
because of their different experiences over the day.

The people who really liked the book said that it was well written--I
think both TC and Steve Simms found
it to be a real page-turner with good characters. (And though John
Gallman didn't like the book, he did say, multiple times,
that it was professionally written.) Simms also said he liked the
book's matter-of-fact approach to suspension of disbelief; the author
did not belabor the implausible parts, but just let the reader accept
them (or not). Simms also found the book to be a little reminiscent of
Philip K. Dick (one of his favorite authors) and found himself to be
really engaged with the book--he would try to anticipate which Albert
would narrate the next chapter, and what that Albert would say. This
was the first Brin novel that Simms had read, and several people
encouraged him to try Startide Rising next.